LabsDV Camcorders
The MVX 200i is the more expensive of the two Canons on test, coming in right on our upper price limit with a guide price of £699, although it can be found for as little as £477 online. It's geared up to provide high-quality digital stills as well as video footage. To this end, it has a 1.3 megapixel CCD and a mechanical shutter. Still photographs can be stored on a SD/MMC card, and support for the PictBridge printing standard means you can connect the MVX 200i to a PictBridge-compatible printer and print still photos directly from the memory card. For capturing video, the 14x optical zoom, f1.8 lens is average for cameras in this price range, and you're best off ignoring the 280x digital zoom. The eight program
The MVX 200i uses Canon's Digic DV processor, which improves colour fidelity, making blue skies blue rather than white and keeping skin tones neutral. It performed very well in our indoor tests. The auto-exposure was great, with excellent colour fidelity, and the image stabiliser gave good results. Blue sky was exposed correctly, but that was the case with all the high-end cameras on test. Our only criticism is that the auto-exposure system was occasionally a little sluggish in adapting to changes in lighting. We were impressed, however, by its reproduction of natural skin tones. Indoors, there was a little more noise than we would have liked in low lighting conditions, and it failed our darkness test. The mic picked up sounds well, but there was some tape noise. The way a camcorder handles is almost as important as the quality of the results it produces, and this camera scores well in this area. It's comfortable to hold, and the 2.5in LCD screen seems somehow bigger than most, despite having identical dimensions. Importantly, tapes are loaded from the top of the camera. Good performance and excellent features make the Canon MVX 200i one of the best camcorders on test.
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